


the expansion of the universe

by hesselives



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Background Relationships, F/F, Found Family, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, M/M, Nile-centric, a bit of angst, a bit of science, a lot of not-science, astronaut nile, lost family, nothing that lives lives forever, references to interstellar, space imagery, very little understanding about time dilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 08:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25347526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hesselives/pseuds/hesselives
Summary: Joe and Nicky are dying, and Nile must face an unknown future where she may be the only immortal left. When Andy had told her all those centuries ago that she reminded her of the beginning, Nile didn’t think it would echo around her now, at the end of all she knows.Or, Nile prepares her heart for the lonely expanse of outer space.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 51
Kudos: 334





	the expansion of the universe

If you live long enough, time bends in different ways.

It elapses, it stretches, it creases. The problem is that it never stops.

They all know this. But it doesn’t stop Nile from searching for ways to bend it literally.

“With enough negative energy, you can keep a wormhole open long enough for a person to pass through,” she says in an impassioned voice. “A whole ship, even.”

With the death of the Earth on the horizon, the CIA had thrown the full weight of the U.S. government behind Nile’s mission to solve gravitational propulsion, which would make it possible to launch whole colonies not just into space, but also light years past entire galaxies.

It is _possible_. Theoretically. Nile has always believed in her capacity to learn, if not always her capacity to live.

As an immortal, she is uniquely suited to bearing the collective knowledge and calculations of humanity’s long fascination with the stars. Over these past few centuries, she has accumulated them, sifted through them, pried them apart, and twined them together again. With every breakthrough, she feels closer to the precipice of a whole new world.

Only, it’s a world without Andy or Quynh, without Booker, without Nicky or Joe.

There’s a deep-seated exhaustion in the lines of Nicky’s ageless face. Joe is sleeping on his lap, his thin frame and long limbs curled up beside him. Life has been slowly seeping away from them for some time now, like grains of sand through an hourglass.

Nevertheless, Nicky smiles. “A whole ship?”

“Yes,” Nile says firmly.

Nicky stifles a cough, a labored breath. “I know it’s pointless to wonder why, but God should have really given immortality to Azophi and Galileo, instead of Joe and me.”

Nile shakes her head. “Aren’t you always saying everything happens for a reason?”

“I do say that a lot, don’t I?”

His tone is light but melancholic. Nile feels a familiar ache settling in her chest. “I wish you could both join me.”

“You know the reason we can’t,” Nicky says gently. “You’re humanity’s brightest hope now, Nile. Joe and I will turn back to dust by the time you set off for the stars.”

She doesn’t cry, but the sorrow sinks even deeper into her soul. “I’m afraid,” she says simply, honestly. “I’ve never been alone like this before.”

“ _Semper fidelis_ ,” Nicky says, plucking the motto of the U.S. Marines from a distant memory. “You have always been faithful. Have faith in yourself.”

Nile looks down at the floor. She hasn’t been a Marine for so long. And yet it’s still ingrained somewhere inside her, fragments buried in her mind and her muscles. She surmises that maybe priesthood has never really left Nicky, in the same way.

Being a warrior had never left Andy. Had never left Quynh. There was a fire inside them that would burn too fiercely, too destructively, if they couldn’t unleash it upon the scourges of the world. Fighting was their language, their unspoken way of making sense of things.

Even in their last days, they kept seeking out missions. They would always return, though, with ancient astrological texts on the brink of falling apart. And it wasn’t until one day, when they didn’t return, that Nile realized they had – in their own way – taken on her mission as their own, too.

Being in the past had never left Booker. His gaze had always looked behind him, and his heart had never grown whole again. Instead of fire, it seemed to Nile that a boundless grief had taken root inside his core. And one day, it had grown too heavy even for his immortal soul, causing it to collapse like a dying star, leaving a black hole behind.

The three of them had never really been the same, afterwards.

Nicky and Joe had opted to live out a quiet existence together, traveling to mosques and monasteries and churches in search of a more gentle purpose. An eternal search for the meaning of their faiths, which they knew all too well wouldn’t be answered in their lifetime.

Nile had chosen to chase the future. To fight for survival not through politics and weapons, but through research and endless iterations of failed calculations.

It’s not failure that scares her. She’s an immortal. She has already beaten the odds.

She lifts her head to look at Nicky again. “I may not return. I don’t want to forget my family.”

He reaches out to hold her hand, his grip firm and warm. “Don’t be afraid. Even if our memories are lost and our bodies are gone, our souls will never forget. We were all brought together in this lifetime for a reason.” He smiles wryly at himself. “We will be brought together again.”

+

_Chariot, T minus five minutes and counting._

“Flight, Chariot. Copy that,” Nile says, flipping on the auxiliary power units.

The shuttle shakes as the vent hood is automatically raised to clear the external tank of gaseous nitrogen. She lifts a hand to close and lock down her visor. She exhales and hears her breath amplified through her microphone.

_Chariot, T minus ten seconds and counting. You are a go for launch. May the force be with you._

“Flight, Chariot. Ready for launch,” Nile says, grinning despite herself. Her seat rattles violently as the rocket boosters ignite. “See you on the flip side.”

An enormous plume of smoke fills the air as the space shuttle, Chariot, lifts off from ground.

She feels the stretch and pull, down in her bones, in the back of her teeth, as the shuttle fights against gravity.

She feels like she’s undergoing mitosis, her soul pulling into two, a part left behind on dying plains and blackened oceans, and a part hurtling forward into an unknown frontier that is both familiar and terrifying.

She reaches up to touch the photos of her birth family and her immortal family clipped onto a thin ledge above her head. She is still alone, but a little bit less so, this way.

The shuttle breaches the orange glimmer of the troposphere, then the ephemeral white of the stratosphere, before finally entering the darkness of the mesosphere.

The darkness is almost incomprehensible as it stretches out before her, an utterly silent and timeless expanse.

And in that expanse, somewhere, lies the answer she seeks.

She calibrates the navigation, practically from muscle memory from all the simulations she’s done.

The Chariot continues forward, a speck of light flying through the dark, towards a wormhole that sits on the edge of a black hole many light years away.

+

The silence of outer space is deafening.

Nile tries to fill it with playlists and recordings, but the silence always returns, a coda at the end of every song.

Music had always been a steady comfort to her, back on Earth. But here, it ebbs and flows in her soul like inconstant tides, pulling and pushing the weight of the past into the weightlessness of the future.

She takes out her earbuds and floats over to the cockpit.

The view out the window is the same. Endless black.

She hopes she’ll get to see a nebula again soon. There’s something about its beautiful, colorful flares that lightens her heart. She’s studied them extensively in the past, wanting to know how a cloud of dust and gas could give birth to the next generation of stars.

She wonders how many deaths and rebirths in space have gone unnoticed. Trillions, probably.

She shakes her head. It’s hard to think of herself as immortal, in comparison.

Her thoughts drift towards Quynh, as she presses a hand against the curved glass that separates her from the cold quiet suffocation outside. Without it, the shuttle is little more than a steel coffin, cast adrift into a dark expanse that’s just as vast and unknowable as the sea.

She’s been aboard the Chariot for a mere twenty-six years now.

She hasn’t forgotten her family yet.

+

The black hole is much stronger than Nile had anticipated.

Its extraordinary gravitational pull swallows everything around it with a relentless inevitability.

She cries out, her muscles straining beyond her tested limitations, as she urges the shuttle to ride the edge of the black hole’s force field. She sees the wormhole hovering ahead, a barely visible tunnel that shimmers with light particles being pulled into the void.

She only has one shot to make it through.

The hope of an inhabitable galaxy on the other side of the wormhole doesn’t even cross her mind right now, as the adrenaline rushes through her blood, triggering a primitive fight-or-flight response.

She clenches her hands even tighter around the power lever that’s already pushed to maximum thrust.

She will fight like hell.

The metal panels around the shuttle shriek as the pressure from the black hole increases. The red warning light beeps rapidly, matching her hammering heartbeat, as something at the back of the shuttle breaks off.

The debris flashes by the window as it gets sucked in and disappears.

“Fuck,” Nile grits out. “Come on, Chariot girl. Don’t fail me now. You’re strong, you can do this.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, as the pressure rises to an unbearable level, feeling like it’s about to pull the very blood from her veins.

“Come on!” she screams, as the shuttle struggles mightily towards the wormhole.

The thrusters shake and rattle in protest as the fire bursting out from them flares one more time, then dies out from exhaust failure.

The silence returns and Nile holds her breath. She doesn’t know if the silence will be eternal this time.

The black hole wraps its invisible hands around the broken shuttle—

And Nile feels herself tipping into the wormhole, just barely.

A new silence envelops the Chariot for a brief moment, before she blacks out.

+

Nile wakes with a lungful of manufactured oxygen, and her hand immediately flies to her visor.

She doesn’t remember closing it.

She looks around in a daze. She doesn’t remember exiting the shuttle either.

In fact, the Chariot is nowhere to be seen.

Nile clenches her jaw, trying not to panic.

She’s floating in a strange tunnel that’s neither dark nor light. A liminal space that’s entirely quiet, except for her shallow breaths.

Is she inside the wormhole? Or has she already left it?

A deep fear grabs hold of her, as she struggles to remember. Her long memory is useless here.

Suddenly, a faint glimmer of light catches her attention, at the corner of her eye. It seems to be traveling quite fast, but it’s not any kind of shuttle that she can identify.

She trembles, willing herself to face it head-on.

The light grows impossibly bright, its long rays shooting past her, criss-crossing around her, like a strange architectural blueprint.

She must be dreaming.

“A tesseract?” she whispers. “But who—?”

The massive grid of light vibrates, as if acknowledging her presence.

A million questions converge on the tip of her tongue, but they fall away, as she looks down at the light paths below her. There’s something about them that— feels familiar, somehow.

She turns slowly, pressing the controllers on her wrist to propel downwards.

As she dives down, past grids that glow like skyscrapers at night, she edges closer to the place that pulls at her soul.

She stops breathing and her eyes widen, as she sees different, tessellated images of her own past, folded around and on top of each other. Her heart clenches with a sudden painful longing, as she drinks in the sight of her birth family and immortal family.

The images suddenly fall away (“No!” Nile cries out), revealing a new series of images.

She frowns in confusion. They show her families again, but— they’re walking around in places they’ve never been, and meeting each other in circumstances that have never transpired. Then she sees them dying in ways they’ve never died.

The realization settles in slowly and overwhelmingly, like an anchor to the bottom of her mind. She’s seeing pasts that have happened, could have happened, have never happened.

These are pasts that are all possible, in their various and endless permutations.

Time is not linear. It is instead—infinite. Its death and rebirth are woven invisibly through the fabric of the universe.

The light vibrates again, stronger and brighter than before.

It grows and grows, until it’s too bright for Nile’s eyes to bear.

She shields her eyes with her arms, and feels a sudden warmth encompassing her whole body.

She braces herself for another bout of fear, but surprisingly it doesn’t come.

The last thing that crosses her mind, before she sinks into darkness again, is: _I’m safe._

+

Nile wakes again, but this time on a sand-worn shoreline by an unknown sea. She tastes salt in the air and hears gulls crying above in the sky.

She groans as she lifts herself up, and looks down to see that her space suit is gone. She’s wearing the dark blue uniform that she had on beneath the suit. Grains of sand are still stuck in between its creases. She shakes them out as she stands.

The wind brings a faint series of noises, and she turns her head to look at a distant campsite. Red embroidered tents ripple in the breeze, and dappled horses are grazing lazily nearby.

She expects to feel tired, after going so long without food or water, but somehow she doesn’t.

She walks towards the campsite, slowly and with her hands visible at her side, so her presence doesn’t alarm anyone.

A group of girls playing in the grass lift their heads and stare at her for a bit, before resuming their game. They resemble each other, as if they’re sisters. They might very well be.

The youngest eventually breaks away from the group and looks up with a bright gaze at Nile. She is very young, with blue-black hair and wind-chapped cheeks. Sun-sheened skin and a toothy smile.

A girl who does not yet know the swing of an axe or the grief of being left behind.

Nile’s heart aches with a sudden fierceness.

“Nile Freeman,” she says, crouching down gently and pointing to herself.

The girl peers at her curiously, and then - as if sensing an ineffable kinship - places a small hand over her heart.

“Andromache e Scolote.”

_Hello, Andromache the Scythian. We meet again._


End file.
